Adelaide festival 2014: Tuesday 11 March – as it happened

On today’s liveblog: Windmill Theatre Company share their teenage diaries, we talk to artist Benedict Drew, and bring you reviews from Tectonics and Womadelaide. Plus more on the Adelaide Biennial and Fringe, and the latest edition of our festival podcast

Fringe review: The Fear of Missing Out

We’ll start heading out for our latest festival shows quite soon. But first, we have the latest Fringe review from Jane Howard, who has been to see FOMO: The Fear of Missing Out at Radio Adelaide. Which is apt, given it is a show about community radio (well sort of). You can read Jane’s three-star review in full here, or there’s a snippet below.

In Studio Two, a small audience gathers for the recording of the Zoe McDonald show. Zoe, we’re told, has the fear of missing out, and tonight that needs to be explored … The work quickly becomes less about Zoe’s FOMO and more a bizarre, almost nightmarish dissection of her life. McDonald’s performance is sharp and funny, and her text deftly integrates other characters. While her vocal performance and accent work are, naturally, at the production’s core, it is her physical performance that is the most humorous: the blank stare of Dina; the downturned mouth and protruding chin of Jessica; the upturned pinky fingers of Anita.

In pictures: dinner at Lola's Pergola

Adelaide festival’s pop-up nightspot Lola’s Pergola emerged on the banks of the Torrens in the city centre almost two weeks ago. With degustation dinners from top Australian chefs and DJs playing late into the night, photographer Alicia Canter enjoyed some evenings down by the river. You can see a whole gallery of beautiful images here, or catch a few below.

First Fruit Dinners take place in an outdoor area at Pop up bar Lola's Pergola, located in the city on the banks of the River Torrens. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the GuardianThe host of First Fruit Dinners, Maxwell Mason, speaks to guests. The dinners take place in an outdoor area at Pop up bar Lola's Pergola, located in the city on the banks of the River Torrens. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the GuardianThe theme for the degustation dinner this evening was Appetite for Excellence where seasonal produce from Adelaide Farmers Market created the ultimate BBQ. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the GuThe food was created by chefs Chloe Proud from Ethos in Hobart, James Viles from Biota Dining in Bowral, NSW Jake Davey from Est in Sydney and Sonia Bandera from Rockpool in Melbourne. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

Windmill Theatre: practitioners remember being 15

Windmill Theatre's Girl Asleep, at the Space Theatre Adelaide. Pictured: Paige Whitby as young Greta and Ellen Steele as the fifteen year old Greta Driscoll. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

Adelaide’s Windmill Theatre creates work for children, families and teenagers, and at the festival they’re performing a trilogy of works created for teenagers; adolescent coming-of-age stories with a very distinct aesthetic. The newest of these, Girl Asleep, is set on the evening of Greta’s 15th birthday as she struggles to come to terms with leaving childhood behind. So we asked the Windmill team to talk to us – and their younger selves – about their 15th year, and their memories of it.

Video: Stone/Castro's Blackout

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Bill Code and Jana Perkovic have made this video about Stone/Castro’s Blackout, which takes audiences to the dark side of the human soul. When a power-cut appears to interrupt proceedings aboard a wedding boat, the partygoers begin to act strangely. All is not as it seems in this physical theatre production which has been taking audiences through the spectrum of human emotions at the 2014 Adelaide Festival. Director Paulo Castro explains how the attacks of September 11, 2001, led to the birth of the piece, and what he thinks of Australian critics’ using the term “theatre of the absurd”

Fringe: Swamp Juice, Edge!, Bound for Glory

Jane Howard takes the risks at Fringe so you don’t have to – and it doesn’t always go in her favour. A punt on Bound for Glory on Monday night did not end well: the show was “an uncomfortable, unfunny and underdeveloped piece about two men trying to find money to buy pizza for our party” reports Jane.

Still, she had a better time at both Swamp Juice and Edge!, although it does rather sound like she’s still processing the latter, which is pretty dark comedy. Below you’ll find an extract from her daily Fringe diary for you, and you can catch up with the whole thing over here.

Canadian artist Jeff Achtemcreates his puppets out of cardboard and recycled materials, and both puppet and shadow are exposed simultaneously. It’s a celebration of simple things used to great effect. The show is billed as ending in an “eye-popping 3D finale”, with red and blue light, and old-school glasses used to render the puppets in 3D. It’s genuinely quite extraordinary. The audience of children raised on Disney 3D films screamed as the shadow of a bird flew towards their face – and I must admit I did too.

There was also a lovely holiday Monday vibe at Tuxedo Cat when I went to see Edge!, the story of 11-year-old “tween viral sensation” Stella, played by 25-year-old Isabel Angus. Stella starts as a bubbly child, but the work becomes a commentary – and harsh criticism – of the sexualisation of women and girls, and particularly on the pressures faced by young women in the public spotlight.

Festival podcast: episode four

Time for the next of our festival podcasts from producer Belinda Lopez. On today’s show, recorded last night after the culmination of Tectonics, we’re discussing the highs and lows of the festival with Jana Perkovic – who managed to see a five star and one star show straight after each other – why our perception of avant-garde music could do with being more like our perception of conceptual art, and how to make good theatre for teenagers.

Guardian Australia's culture team record latenight in a park Photograph: Vicky Frost for the Guardian

All this, and the delightful sounds of an Adelaide park at midnight – as evidenced by this quick phone snap above. (We edited the drunk people out, sadly). You can listen to the podcast here, or subscribe via iTunes. You can also catch up with the rest of the festival’s audio below.

Fringe review: Glory Box

Backstage with the Glory Box performers, photographed in The Garden of Unearthly Delights by Alicia Canter for the Guardian

Jana Perkovic took a trip down to the Garden of Unearthly Delights to see Glory Box, a big burlesque hit on the festival circuit from Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith. Jana is not completely convinced by the show – at times the idea seems better than the reality of the acts, she notes, although you won’t find yourself glancing at your watch and counting off the minutes.

Finucane and Smith’s productions have a cumulative, atmospheric effect. It is not just the sum of the performances that one must consider, but the entire world crafted around them, down to the carefully calibrated tone of their marketing material: “Seductive Spectacle! Wild Child Circus! Live Art Exotica!” (One of their past events advertised “Anatomically Correct Erotica!”) The magical, carnivalesque setting of Adelaide’s Garden of Unearthly Delights works perfectly to support the world they are creating: equal parts camp and horror; tongue-in-cheek yet uncompromising.

Glory Box is an uneven and often unpolished show. Many acts are better in concept than in execution. But the total experience is so grotesque, and bizarrely feminist – here is an entirely female cast, switching between sparkly gowns and full frontal nudity, turning their dainty, feminine acts into terrifying, omnipotent monsters – that it is not at all uninteresting to watch.

Tectonics: baffling, scary and comical – but never boring

Forget new rave, here's new grave: Gravetemple play Tectonics Adelaide Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

Alex Needham has filed a great review of last night’s Tectonics marathon gig. It’s so good, that it’s making me think I should have joined him for nine hours of rustling, shouting and avant garde improvisation. (And this from a woman who tends to like a tune.) Catch up with what you’ve missed below – and read Alex’s review in full here.

The MO of Techtonics is to bring together the classical and avant garde worlds, but the latter far outweighed the former, and the audience – which ranged pleasingly from heavy metal fans here to see the closing performance by Gravetemple to elderly classical music buffs – were encouraged to come down from the tiered seating to immerse themselves in the music. Well, if you could call it music – certainly some pieces, like Marco Fusinato’s TEMA, a 30 terrifying minutes of feedback which would have made a dentists’ drill sound melodious, stretched the definition to its utmost. But then, that was part of the point.

While Tectonics was often baffling, scary or comical, despite its great length it was never boring, with something bizarre and original rarely more than two works away.

Femi Kuti on stage at Womadelaide 2014. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

There could be no more fitting spectacle to close the festival than Kuti’s hyperactive ensemble of musicians and dancers who seem to be putting on at least three shows at once. Femi’s feats of unbroken, circular breathing on the saxophone are worth setting a stop-watch for, while you’d pay good money to watch his horn section alone. Then there’s the astonishing trio of women who, when not belting out full-bloodied harmonies, turn their backs to the audience and deliver a masterclass that reveals Miley Cyrus to be a rank amateur at twerking.

And here is Alfred on Shanren

A huge crowd gravitates to this unexplored corner of the park, their curiosity piqued by the choppy, folk-indie mix of ethnic lutes and electric guitars. Shanren conclude a triumphant set with a rousing version of Jiu Ge , the delirious traditional drinking song that went straight to everyone’s heads when Mongolian metal sensations Hanggai performed it earlier in the weekend, and will be remembered as the unofficial anthem of Womadelaide 2014.

Video: Julia de Ville's Phantasmagoria: taxidermy on a grand scale

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All this week we’ve been asking curators and artists to share their favourite works from the Adelaide Biennial 2014. Today, Robert Reason, curator of European and Australian decorative arts at the Art Gallery of South Australia, introduces Julia de Ville’s childhood room filled with taxidermy. Mummified cats; stuffed, startled-looking rats; a beautiful, morose horse and an intricately beaded pig and alpaca lend the room an ethereal quality. And all the while, a charming octopus lamp and a child’s mobile made from hearts hang in the air.

Benedict Drew: 'It felt like psychogeographic warfare in my head'

Benedict Drew with his work The Persuaders Photograph: Tony Lewis

Alex Needham has been chatting to the artist Benedict Drew, whose work is showing as part of the festival’s headline visual art show, Worlds in Collision. Alex describes it as “a head trip into both outer and inner space, the frontiers of technology, the human psyche and the occult.”

Drew’s work at the festival is called The Persuaders, which you can find at the SASA in the University of South Australia, and takes you through three rooms. Here’s more from Alex.

The first contains several flatscreen TVs showing fluorescent colours and, on two of them, revolving monsters that look to be made of mud. In the second, there are overhead projectors with protractors and the kind of cardboard stars used to show prices in discount shops arranged on them to look like faces. In the third, there is a row of more mud monsters arranged on plinths, watching a film projected on a large pull-down screen. The film consists of a swirling pattern and the instructions to “breath in/breath out” [sic]. As it gets faster and faster, it’s intercut with images of building sites and railings overlaid with slogans like “stop fucking changing things” and “stop it being so solid”. It’s a complicated, beguiling work about our relationship with an increasingly sophisticated digital world – one that is starting to make as many demands on us as we are on it.

The artist, who is Australian-born but based in the UK, explains: “Part of that work is a personal scream about living in London, really.”

Adelaide's best cheap eats

Good though some of the work in Adelaide is, a woman cannot survive on culture alone, so we asked Jane Howard to help us find the city’s best eats on a budget. And who better to give us their recommendations than the stallholders at Adelaide Central Market, the city’s amazing produce centre. I wish I could take it home with me: it’s not so fancy that your weekly essentials now cost more than your mortgage, but there’s also some fantastic artisanal produce for sale in its halls including some excellent cheese.

You can read the stallholder’s nominations for Adelaide’s top 10 cheap eats in Jane’s article here, which includes more of Alicia Canter’s gorgeous portraits.

Lucinna Chua of The Asian Grocer at Adelaide Central Market. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the GuardianCheeses on the Say Cheese stall in the Market. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the GuardianProduce at the House of Organics & Sustainably Grown Produce stall. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the GuardianPeter Pessios of Central Market Flowers. Photograph: Alicia Canter for the Guardian

Last night's Twitter reviews

It’s Vicky Frost with you on the liveblog all day. We’ll have reviews from the Guardian Australia team coming soon. But first, some reaction to yesterday at the festival from Twitter. Dan Thorpe hits the nail on the head here, I think – at times this festival has felt very male, particularly in its music commissioning.